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In some great redemption offering following the last thought I left on here, I’ve been gifted a couple of very subtle, but wholly significant, opportunities for acceptance. Levelling out ways of seeing, of organising my head, and remembering that bracing hard for firm and steady is in most cases a cheating of self. A denial of the constancy and flux of emotions we are so generously gifted to explore - no matter how exhausting at times. At this very moment nothing feels fractured. All is open and flowing, it’s a very good life. This week we've had three men ripping up the carpet from 9-5. At the end of each day I come down to find they have duteously transported the furniture back inside, atop the spongey new layer. Working from their fresh memory, with zero attachment to a prior existence and place, the furniture is almost always categorically placed wrong. The initial moment sees me slammed into cognitive dissonance. A confrontational internal tantrum of sorts - 'that’s so not how it was..' But who is to say? Reaching for some philosophical interpretation inside the example of three sweaty and aloof carpet layers who just want to knock off and have a beer is likely a big push.. But, it has me reflecting on the phenomenon of constructed memory. Where we go to to find comfort amidst change - both intrinsic, and out there in the tangible world of things and furniture and faces. I’ve been listening to George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ (in that recursive playback fashion only suited to when you listen to music alone) and finding little glimmers I’d missed before. It’s sparking a recall of something a very special sage of a friend said to me on the phone once: “the end of an era punctuates or structures one's life. It leaves you asking: what are/were those years?” Or even on a more quotidian basis - what was that moment? How do I carry it, or conversely, just leave it be? A further realisation of the non-linear, reason-season-or-lifetime aspect of this brief dance on earth we’re all involved in. Same goes, perhaps, when romantic rumination takes hold. For an experience to be meaningful does it have to have been felt and kept alive by both? What’s our business in really knowing whether the other person was truly in a moment sincerely or just reviewing us in kindness anyway. What do we owe each other in that regard? Not all experiences usher in continuation do they. Can we let a one time feeling be enough and not discredit it or become convinced it isn’t a worthy part of our story if it doesn’t get built upon in some Disney-like fashion? Perhaps connection is not always a solution to our yearning, but there to serve as a mirror of it. A kinship over the longing for some kind of self-clarity. Permission to be seen, rather than a petition to be saved. Or a chance to encounter another beyond cognitive effort. Sometimes it’s not even about catching lightening in a bottle, but about bodies. Almost like skin hunger. The need to be tactile. To be felt, and feel yourself having an effect. Not in a lustful or salacious way, but a curiosity about how another’s body fits alongside yours in time and space. How they look and feel and exist in close proximity, kiboshing the hyped up story of distance and detachment we can weave our own physical relativity into when we are alone. In my existential moments, I find I trip up on the same old thing. The truth that certain things in time - places, feelings, abilities, ages, connections - will eventually need to either pass, be let go of, or allowed to change. Then comes the pressure to reinforce the sentiments and relationships in a grasping effort to keep them from slipping or being forgotten. Not a bad thing, just very tiresome. Writing often serves as a way of trying to solidify it. But is it just compulsion, or a necessary teasing out? This has evidently become one of my themes for 2023 - to remind myself when I’m rushing or pushing to linger ‘just a minute more’ (thanks Le). To soak it in as it is, before or after the frame shifts. To document a little less! To just feel and experience, rather than outsource my memory to a platform or collection of pixels. And any which way, it is good to feel the pen snug under fingers again. To be fixed on intention and radiating thanks onto a page after the blur of lengthy fallowing and self-doubt. To be floating each morning with a heightened awareness of beauty, intensely alive and here for it all. The bare bones simplicity of this summer routine is working a treat.  (Image: From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes, 1874 edition) I’ve always had a habit of commemorating ordinary things with unnecessary sentimentality: ‘This is the last time I’ll eat breakfast as a teenager.’ ‘This time two years ago I was eating breakfast in another country.’ ‘I wonder if the person driving the old green Corolla - my first car - thinks about who drove it before they did?’ ‘I wonder what about me will be different next time I stand in this exact spot, in front of this very vantage point?’ It’s a form of being utterly seduced by the insistence of progression and improvement, while trying to retain the familiar feelings of an assured ‘what is.’ When you’re viewing things from a sort of melodramatic isthmus point, where the could of it all will soon be rearranged into ‘what was’, it’s like being suspended inside a realm of possibility. I’ve often thought how torturous it must be for people awaiting the results of some big diagnosis. Or, those few days after receiving one, trying to contort their huge visions for the future into a harsh and dulled new self restricted by physical fallout. The small pocket of space when someone wakes and comes to, in a groggy, warm moment of forgetfulness and hope for a day as normal before the reality sinks in. In a more collective way, it’s kind of piteous watching our society try to reconcile our bygone era of hyper-reality and excess with the stark, confronting modesty and restriction of these recession years. We are wedged inside a dichotomy: where we balk at paying $9 for a cauliflower, yet avidly plan our somewhat unjustified, Instagram-driven travel to Europe for a moment of escapism. Despite the continent being in crisis, our drive is still only concerned with grasping for, and consuming, a dissolving ideal. Believing that because ‘that’s how we’ve always been’, that that’s how we always should be. Does anyone else out there find it way too tempting to preemptively analyse the zeitgeist of ‘our times?’ And what does that even mean?? I have to be careful to moderate myself as I try to comprehend things. To find a kinship and focus beyond mere observation and critique. Because there’s a rawness of care that seems to arrive when all the old hiding spots feel ill fitting or off limits, leaving you asking the all important question: “am I a comfortable dwelling place?” In the wake of instability I’ve come to parse out this sort of confronting realisation that human partnerships are unpredictable and intertwined. Like in Titanic when Kate Winslet is in that busty dress on the wrong side of the railing and tells Leo DiCaprio to go away but he just says “I can’t. I’m too involved now.” Or maybe it’s also like what my friend’s dad said during his speech on her wedding day: “love is risky business.” Yet how beautiful it is to blindly track on towards a future of unknowns with others. Being equally invested and affected by their private worlds, having let them become entangled with yours. There are so many more variables to contend with. A greater susceptibility to loss of control over your own desired outcome or aspired long-term plan, but a worthy sacrifice knowing it goes both ways. And that mutual choice to stick around “despite” must feel like a pretty good and grown up thing to want to do. How poetic it all is me here this morning looking out at snow and mist and barren branches, travellator cars an early morning ciggy for the hooded tradie at the rear of his ute parked up on the wet road but here's me this morning pink robe and rocking chair mouthful by mouthful blink by waking blink honoured to be hearing the steady falling rain.  In the sleepy profundity of wee hours toilet break thinking, I remembered how I used to wake with a great sense of anticipation. Often too excited to fall asleep, having to wait out a whole nine more til I could thrust back the blankets and feel gratitude swarm me as I declare “this is my life!” This steady and patient adult routine has its benefits indeed but, in compound with 2022 on the whole, just feels way too grown up. There’s less shine. The space reserved for wonder is now being hogged by predictability. Still being at home feels a little insignificant, but also incredibly delight-able. Yet, as soon as I rest in the delighting I feel shame for indulging the insignificance of now's only true declaration being “nothing much going on in my corner..” Then I thought of the multigenerational character arcs portrayed on a particular show I’ve been falling into. How witnessing them across four seasons has started to rekindle in me a solid real-time revelation: that this isn’t all of it. Soon I felt how one day this won’t be my primary puzzle to solve. The ‘where shall I live, how shall I be’ one. My bed won’t wait empty when I rouse to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. My mornings will see me declare “this is my life!” once again, but not because it’s reverted, or looks familiar to those past days, but because I’ll be rejoicing in the new one. Coming to wakefulness and remembering, I am a wife. I’m pregnant. I have kids who will soon come running in to ravish me with innocent affection. My son’s getting married today! It doesn’t matter what the context or carnal container looks like then. It’s the fact of everything continuing onwards. It’s the fact of life. I asked myself yesterday, what activity do I feel a genuine pleasure doing while it’s happening, not just from the rush of reward chemicals after the fact? What do I engage in that is not just obligation, or a means of reaching some desired outcome through a gruelling commitment to the thing? Eating? Eating is great...but a problematic route of return. Then came the real one. The activity I could fall into for a lifetime and feel as though it were none passed at all. Here it is: writing. Writing is home base.  The young couple walking ahead to baggage claim looked about twenty-three. He perambulated with a buoyant swagger and flexuous honeyed Hugh Grant hair; wearing a slim-fit suede suit jacket over a navy shirt with the buttons open down his chest and black straight jeans that stopped just above his platformed leather brogues. The sort of self-aware command of a public space befitting of a University band boy circa 2018. A warm and insouciant looking girl bounced alongside him, flirting in a language that was apparently only to be interpreted by them. Her oversized brown coat slinking off one shoulder, forced to join her sneaker-bearing feet by the gravitational pull of a full and slouchy canvas bag. He reached out a hand and ruffled the back of her head in affection as they walked. I observed them for a while. Then, as if by access to some outer-body vantage point, felt confronted by my own banality. I felt simultaneously critical of their casually flaunted naivety and wildly covetous that it was one no longer belonging to me these five years later…The years when you had so much spare energy to put into outwardly projecting your creativity and hipness. When synchronising your recent op-shop finds was front of mind, and having a nebulous and detached life schedule was an attribution of success. The scope of my worldview feels as though it’s been shrunk in the wash like a wooly sock, and my comprehension of that blissfully simplistic form of youth etiolated by excel spreadsheets and automated meeting requests. I often can’t find the right box in my head to file the plaguing questions of adult life at the moment. I’ve been learning to live inside the push-pull of the common narrative that says “it’s good to have financial security in these times”, which fuels the drive to buckle in to a flight path you don’t feel particularly fulfilled by - Yet, knowing that the things in your life you usually rely upon to feel secure are seemingly harder to find now. Knowing that people out there have but a sliver of it, and would literally die for the anaesthetising monotony of a steady routine. A few weeks ago I unnecessarily deleted a priceless piece of personal time-travel audio, all for the sake of having a swift and efficiently manageable email recycle bin. I had found an 8 minute voice memo, recorded on the fourth of January 2020, before the world changed and navigating Covid was the prevailing thought / concern / contingency plan. It was me rattling off a ‘list’ for myself, in total candour and innocence and idealism. Plans for my career, the years ahead, where to take my ambitions and interests. Who people in the current frame of reference could possibly be to me: Maybe I will go back to Greece with Consider journal this year? Were my various mentors right, should I go back to study? But then I might just come out with a piece of paper and be another aspiring writer amongst the masses trying to make it... Maybe I should just publish a little book of my own? One thing I kept coming back to was this constant press to write scripts. To get more into literature as a craft, not just writing my usual long-winded and subjective monologues for cafe tables. To be more intentional and research based….To transcribe! Everyday dialogue. Witty remarks. Polished come-backs. “People are just so fascinating to me.” It was so light, unimpeded and full of possible energy. Now I have similar thoughts and plans but they will never again be rendered through such a naive pre-pandemic tone. Oh to hear my own voice speaking of my very own reality in a time that was more credulous than this current one. Before I vetted everything I said, buffered it to not sound too certain or idealistic, knowing we are now living inside history and perhaps some future generation will pick it up to gather some accurate truth about how it was to live in 2020/21/22. This switch I can’t flick off. The haunting weight of overthinking and auditing every inkling to make sure it doesn't land me embarrassed or disappointed if it doesn’t pan out.
An interview and photo series sharing my hometown thoughts and visions with Sarah Kourim, founder of 'Muse the Label' in Melbourne. 
January was like a real summer budding. With a meld of transport and accommodation choice proving how almost silly accessible a cross-country leg stretch can be in this little paradise of ours. So too, the convenience of the family car, the profundity of plane rides, the open arms of relatives and generous friends, and the liberation of a pack up-pack down life as one settles into a brief solo camping excursion. At the airport, ready to go home, we south-bound passengers were compliant with our masks on. Again confronted by the automated audio recording which plays intermittently as the luggage carousel spits out our bags, outlining the expectations for safety conscious travel. The subduedly toned woman imploring us, as ever, to keep our physical distance, call a health line immediately if symptoms arise, and please sign in with the tracer app when we can. The new way has been real for almost a full year now, and I’m starting to notice how automatic the systems, requirements, and obligations all feel. This precautionary rhythm is showing no hints of reverting. Signs and billboards are well integrated into our rhetoric and visual narrative - no longer shabby, knock-up signage to meet the urgent and changing state. Now, slick infographics crafted by in-house design teams, algorithmic wizards; with chat-bot response panels and rules for a complaint existence inside our hyper-sanitised, sick-sane world. I've been holding fast to those italicised travel logged words above for a distraction this week. To focus in on what lovely aspects still beckon us away from the repetition of a gloomy collective 2020 dialogue cycle. I want as best I can to pay homage to the fractions and filaments that make for a steady exploration - both inward and outwardly. Marlborough Sounds being my touchstone for a ‘sound’ mind this time around… In improvisation they teach a principle called "Yes, and.” It works by way of always being primed to accept whatever is coming, however offbeat and unforeseen it may be. When someone in a scene vocalises a statement, the recipient listener is encouraged to accept it as truth and remain curious in the unfurling of a new momentum. Although I do see the perils in reaching for this approach when it comes to the many and various questionable assertions being tossed in the air right now, I think there is virtue in the ephemeral aspect of it - the unspoken, energetic, storybook-narrative quality of living we are kind of remiss in acknowledging. With no guesses as to what's next for me personally, and for all of us globally, I'm thinking 'Yes, and' might be the most honest way of ensuring we still keep some humour and surprise in our mind's eye for where the grand plot line may lead.  What a curious act we humans partake in at sea. Here we are upstanding, acquiescent in our anticipation for a flurried and foaming salty beating. Reclaiming our dignity in the champagne aftermath as we scramble for measly scraps of cloth, repositioning them virtuously before the procedure again begins. Such a joyous breed of flagellation, restoring the sane and sound mind through this relentless wearing down of the physical, leaving the soul lustrated in the soupy backwash of the earth.  (Georgia O'Keefe with her rock collection, by John Loengard. A touchpoint image.) One of the big themes for me this year has been context. In the further rejig and alteration to ways of being - slight shifts and complete reconfigurations of approach - I felt a simultaneous experience of deliverance and restoration, loss & longing. Part of some things, exiled from others. The push-me-pull-you of a living ad-lib, non-linear approach to my 20’s with fragmented loyalties to many places, people, processes. Jung said ‘paradox does more justice to the unknowable than clarity does’, and as we are certainly in a moment of obscurity, I see now that context often acts as an immediate buffer to fortify our resolve and inoculate us against the frightful, the gaping, and the nebulous. Beyond the trivialities, disaster, despair and disappointment at large this year, there has still been much good that has surfaced. Apropos the narrative of now, many of us have been ushered in a return to memory and nostalgia as a form of consolation. I like to believe that keeping a journal is a form of time travel - it’s like talking to versions of myself that don’t exist anymore. Re-minding. And this year has been a much more collaborative effort in unpacking those things on the mind, given more chance to take a visit into those of others as we kept in good contact, both in the moment and now once again in my recalling of the conversational fragments all over again. I once heard that the German words for history and story are the same. So while I really love new chapters, and have hope in us possessing a more steady hold of this peculiar rhythm in 2021, I know I’ll be flicking back for a peek at old pages just for comfort every so often. Not so much physically, but in sentiment and feeling. Favourite lines, bits highlighted and dog eared, pages once skipped that need a refresh of my comprehension. Doubling down on the matter of context, I’ve pulled some defining thoughts and words imparted by friends in conversation, to now exist outside of their own and give a somewhat hazy and breviloquent sense of the year.. Or, if not to deliver some kind of coherent summary, perhaps just provide you with a little dash of levity in the recognition of our shared experience and muddled impressions of heart. Much love & thank you as always for your camaraderie in the mind field, Rosie x “I’m feeling philosophically cranky about it. I sort of have to keep telling myself it’s real.” “To max out all forms, to sniff out all corners, to be all ways and all things so as to not reach the end and wonder how it might have felt.” “It’s kind of like a moment of calling - what I think, who I am, my projects, everything is just amplified. My home is like an echo chamber almost.” “Here's to finding romance in the unexpected, the mundane, or even the solitary. There are indeed many hues to the colour of love.” “I always hope for more exploration.” “Us people driving in our linear fashion along the highways like absentminded hamsters in a wheel again.” “Slowly, you see life flourish again. I went from hearing tourists almost 24/7 to hear the birds, the rain... Now you can read better in the night, get to know better the silence.” “Yep, I don't like to brag, but look at me and my window, right?…” “If it was a play I could have written his part, I knew exactly what he would say and how he would say it.” “Letting myself slightly disappear in a slightly unproductive way.” “Post Restante. The joy of slow communication.” “That craft of looking for the right word in an ever changing world. To spend time trying to dress that runaway feeling.” “Books stacked are like a collateral of your current priorities. They sort of have patience for you, they wait patiently for you to be ready for them.” “Great sink-holes of melancholy.” “It was no compromise; I was fortified against resistance after a hearty walk in the brutal cold. This winter is not too mean, and characteristically fulfilling.” “To not be sure of any one thing is a beautiful thing.” “I lost momentum and now I’m kind of over it.” “Idiosyncrasies that would otherwise agitate endear here.” “Look at the sky, it’s like a cloud museum.” “There’s a lackadaisical element. Like a cognitive dissonance. I have a tortured relationship with it.” “Maybe there’s a breaking point of diminishing returns…Too many people know what’s going on that it just becomes a regurgitation of the same thing. It’s not satisfying. I think I polluted my mind looking into certain people or things more than I needed to - it’s about letting the fictional dream be that space, not trying to make sense of everything. Respecting it and letting it work it’s magic on us without trying to control.” “Today was the first day of no sleeves too. Felt a pinch naughty, risky, unexpected.” “Sometimes I feel like with some things I strip away the meaning if I put them into words.” “You can’t legislate against stupidity.” “I feel like I’m in the Camino of my spiritual life. There’s just an end of the day spaceyness, a beautiful surrender to it.” “Maybe we’re all just too neurotic, and that’s the secret.” “It’s like a fifth dimension!” “If the witch trials were now I would’ve been burned at the stake a long time ago.” “I often wonder - how thin is the gap where two people meet in the same moment? Like can you miss it?” “It’s like I don’t trust myself, like I might just float away if someone or something isn’t pinning me down.” “Creativity energy sort of gets shunted. Whether it’s by need for money, or for other obligations. But that is also sort of what’s needed for it’s vitality though isn’t it...that something to push against. Conformity is often the greatest fuel for creative thought.” “Radicchio, avocado and fennel - those are my main men.” “Did you get chicken pies?” “What. Of course not.” “But it’s lockdown, you’ve got to have chicken pies.” “I do love frittata because it’s like a really healthy pizza. Like a really decadent and orgasmic omelette.” “Thats why people read right? To emphatically experience a different reality. The imaginary process. It is as real as anything else - somebody created that, from something. It IS real.” “I milked it for meaning. But I’m not overthinking it.” “It’s all shared experience - No thought is an original thought so no doubt is an original doubt. That’s comforting to me. Someone’s walked it out before.” “If I’m gonna man up you have to man up. It’s the week of manning up!” “Love letters make you give form to your love. To make your feelings into a solid thing.” “You have to remind me, because I might forget. I won’t. But I might.”  (Image: Todd Papageorge) It’s quiet again. Aside from the birds, sheep, cows, cicadas, and the occasional tourist van driving a dirt road down to the beach. It’s the heat that is so distinctly North Island to me. Rural and honest. A little isolated and unkempt but not far from all manner of metropolitan satisfaction. One afternoon I walked around in the garden to take a break from work. Plump beetroots busting out from the earth. Bushels of Coriander and Parsley and mint. Broccoli gone to seed, bloomed into tiny flower heads. A microscopic cauliflower beginning it’s growth, split from inside the bouquet of spiralling rubbery leaves. A lone and plentiful lemon tree waiting over there in the paddock through the chipped wooden gate behind the shed. I don’t own any togs at the moment, so I would just float in the shallows in my underwear with the park and the bay to myself in the evenings. Some days catching the final glimmer of a wet and clearing plush clouded sunset over the water, my butt atrophied from a day of sedentary working and driving back from the city. Other days more spacious, watching my toes emerge from the water a legs length from my bobbing head, and the undulations of the Coromandel turning a deeper purple in the hazy residue of daylight further beyond them. Not having a care in the world, or a thing I could think of that was lacking. Except maybe in flashing moments: company. Company with skin on, that I could see and touch and feel validated in my realness by being in the scene alongside. Company to hear and echo my exclamations of wonder, my squeals of delight. I talked on the phone to my friend Ilona about this as I walked through the sheep paddocks one afternoon. “I go into pariah mode too easily”, she said. An exiled person. “The days I feel alone and isolated and rejected it’s because I don’t have any intimacy, I just need one conversation to fix it for me. It’s co-regulation - feeling like ‘I do exist’ - otherwise there’s nothing to bounce off.” I wonder, can the very structure of a conversation be our reason for deep company even? The company of language. Words delivered right, peppered just to our liking? To be 'speaking the same one', on the same page. Kuru and I were talking over dinner a couple of nights later and a new dimension opened up as he shared of his heritage, and his conviction to be ongoing in living by way of te ao Māori. “Having a second language is having another world view. I only speak and know the words to say in English because of the Māori inside me. That’s shaping everything I say because of the poetry, the way it teaches me to see and know the world.” (Mātaranga Māori.) Later, albeit contradicting but amplifying the mystery of this resolve as we listened to a song and I asked ‘so what are these guys singing about?’ “I don’t really know what they’re saying. I don’t listen to the words. I just listen to the sound. The feeling..” Going full circle, perhaps that is all the Me in my undies floating in the ocean really ever needed to be sure of in that fracturing moment of tension between wanting to be alone and wanting to be with others: it’s never really about the substance of the company itself, but the way it filters through our very bones and fortifies us in our stance, our pace and our endurance as we clumsily trudge on forth all the same. |
